


how falls the serpent

by tansypool



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: F/F, Loss of Faith, Pre-Series, ace lesbian mary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27697048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tansypool/pseuds/tansypool
Summary: At a conference in Lisbon, at nine-thirty in the evening, everything changes in a split second.(As it did in canon, but also, not quite.)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 24





	how falls the serpent

**Author's Note:**

> Part fleshing out of backstory, part Screw Canon She's Gay.
> 
> Thank you Alice for making sure it made sense, given I did my usual thing of writing a lot of it in a post-midnight blur.

Mary Malone, at twenty-eight, her first time in a country that neither raised her nor educated her. A physics conference, far from her first, but the first with her doctorate evident on her name tag - prior conferences seeing the name tags foregone entirely, or with a lack of formality rendering those titles redundant. The work is done, the rewards are beginning to be reaped, and it is as though she has crossed some invisible threshold, to find herself staring into a great unknown.

(She isn’t entirely staring into that great unknown; by the grace of God, that great unknown is merely in one thing that is entirely separate to her  _ everything _ . She can count on one hand how many people here know of her vocation outside of her career. And even if that career is not entirely severed from the  _ everything _ of her life, it is certainly irrelevant. She does not let herself think of pushing it away entirely - much like other things she thinks so little of that she can pretend she never thought them at all, she pushes the thought of that severing away.)

And staring into that great unknown, she feels entirely alone. It is her and her work - her thesis supervisor is now just a colleague. Her only other associate on this continent is of an age with her, having received his doctorate six months after her, and to whom she never speaks about matters beside work, though it is due to nothing more than leading entirely different lives. She supposes that there should be another presence, of Him alongside her, or at least looming in some distance, but it feels as though she has left that particular part of herself entirely abroad.

(She wonders, later, when it all truly changed, having had a looming sense of it that she hadn’t quite been able to place. She realises, later still, talking to her colleague about the conference, when he boasts of his last clear memory of the dinner: forgoing the desserts for more wine when they came out not long past nine. For her, half past nine, the last of the sun fading, the lanterns already aglow, with the taste of marzipan and the sight of dark eyes and dark hair.)

She isn’t alone, though, that much is evident. An evening beginning at a dinner table outside, elbows touching due to proximity, most faces barely familiar. Her former supervisor is sat across from her, his cheeks red with the heat and the drink, no doubt intensified by his neck-concealing white beard, that is for once groomed. (She suspects that he spends his Decembers moonlighting as a Santa Claus, though he has never even hinted at it.) Her fellow newly-minted professor, with his ever-so-slightly-newer-than-hers doctorate, is sat to her left, but she has managed, not entirely intentionally, to barely exchange words with him all night. Beyond them, faces she still can’t put a name to, their name tags discarded hours ago; she only knows that the man in the green paisley shirt has brilliant ideas that he speaks of without stopping to breathe, that the woman at the end of the table with tightly coiled hair had her doctorate at the age of twenty-one.

(She could name some of them now, but not on that night; she soon found her attention otherwise occupied, anyway.)

There is a woman sat almost opposite her, to her former supervisor’s left, with dark hair and dark eyes and olive skin, that she has seen at the conference, but had yet to speak to, until this evening. They keep winding up in the same conversation over the table - easy enough to avoid talking to her colleague on her left, at a table loud with half a dozen simultaneous conversations.

(Not that she’d admit it to herself, that she kept hoping that their conversations would intersect. The woman is pretty, yes, but there’s nothing intimidating about her, and there’s nothing untoward about Mary hoping to see her smile again.)

The dinner turns to drinks and desserts, to mingling in ever-shifting groups, although Mary finds herself drawn to the scent of flowers that seems strongest under one particular lemon tree, and where the breeze from the sea catches at her skirt. The music is slightly softer than towards where others are dancing, the light of the lanterns stronger than that of the lingering sunset.

(Her sister had all but ordered her to pack the skirt, in light of the “unimaginable heat” of the Portuguese summer - the heat being her sister’s words, not her own, and though she’s glad for the lighter clothes, she’d never admit that to Zoe. It’s not as if it’s unbearable - just the warmer end of pleasant. The skirt, on the other hand, is what later turns out to be the most out-of-character part of the evening, despite all that she did not realise, in that moment, was yet to come.)

The woman is another doctor, formally, but tonight is not a formal night, and they do not treat it as such. Instead, it is first names only, as it has been at the table all evening, in which they are not Doctors Malone and Montale, but Mary and Alessa, in a conversation that does not seem to end.

Half past nine - though she does not realise the time quite so precisely until she reflects on it later - with some sort of almond cake, and for a brief moment, she is a child at a birthday party, and then she is back in Lisbon, back staring into those incredibly dark eyes, that she can now admit that she does not want to look away from. It is barely a split second, barely long enough for her to miss a word that was said, but suddenly, there is something in her mind that had not been there, and she does not want to focus on it.

And she doesn’t, not yet; the party fades away as its participants take their leave, alone and not. What is it, if two of them happen to spend some of that evening, wandering along a beach, their conversation not over, even if the night allegedly is?

(She’s never felt the urge to go to bed with anyone, not that she’d admit it were it to suddenly start. She briefly, idly, finds herself wondering if this is the moment in which others would start thinking about that, and tries - and fails - to quash that thought.)

She isn’t  _ flirting _ . She’s a nun, nuns don’t _ flirt _ . She’s just… talking, by moonlight, the conversation falling to more laughter than she might have otherwise expected, and that is all there is to that night - the talking, the soft laughter, the proximity. Another person, another night, she wouldn’t be not-quite-flirting with her, but something has already shifted.

(It is Mary who instigates the kiss, though not that night; anyway, doing so was less the thought of the kiss itself, and more the thought of the closeness, the secrets shared with a soul not her own. But it is always the kisses cited as the inciting moment of something, and never what comes before, or what comes alongside. In the inciting moment of whatever this is, the moment comes long before, when she still  _ is _ what will soon be her past.)

The conference is on still tomorrow, and they reach Alessa’s hotel long before Mary would have liked the evening to end. And so Alessa kisses her cheeks, once, twice, thrice, and seems to consider her for a moment, still a breath away. But she doesn't do anything else, just smiles at Mary, mirroring the expression that Mary knows is on her own face, before leaving her with a soft, lilted  _ good night, _ as she takes her leave _. _ The conference not yet over, the morning looming.

(It is not that night, or the next, but she does spend a night with Alessa, before leaving Lisbon. And it isn't as though it is  _ unenjoyable, _ but it is far from an experience she will go out of her way to repeat, no matter how gentle the hands guiding her own through motions she has no prior idea about. She'd gladly repeat the morning, though, of sunlit sheets and feather-soft kisses and coffee brewed strong enough to make her jittery; she just sometimes wonders if the morning after is worth the effort of the night before.)

But Mary can’t quite go back to her hotel - not yet. Instead, she walks back to the water and stands in the shallows, her feet digging into the cool, damp, sand. And she thinks, of that great yawning absence, of a chasm that was so recently not there at all. It’s suddenly so simple, everything that she was washed away with the tide, and she can’t even bear to miss it, with something else left in its wake. He was there, and He is not, and it’s as clear to her as the rush of the breeze in her hair, as the light of the moon on the water, of the touch of lips against her cheek and softly spoken words.

It is the easiest thing in the world, then, to unfasten the chain around her neck, and to leave her unadorned, to throw the crucifix to the mercy of the sea, and walk away, with skin slowly drying in the evening warmth, her life no longer controlled by something beyond itself, but at the mercy of her choices alone.


End file.
